Teochew dialect


Teochew is a dialect of Chaoshan Min, a Southern Min language, that is spoken by the Teochew people in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong and by their diaspora around the world. It is sometimes referred to as Chiuchow, its Cantonese rendering, due to the English romanisation by colonial officials and explorers. It is closely related to some dialects of Hokkien, as it shares some cognates and phonology with Hokkien, although the two are not largely mutually intelligible.
Teochew preserves many Old Chinese pronunciations and vocabulary that have been lost in some of the other modern varieties of Chinese. As such, many linguists consider Teochew one of the most conservative Chinese languages.

Languages in contact

This refers to Chaozhou, the variant of Southern Min spoken in China.

Mandarin

Chaozhou children are introduced to Standard Chinese as early as in kindergarten; however, Chaozhou remains the primary medium of instruction. In the early years of primary education, Mandarin becomes the sole language of instruction, but students typically continue to speak to one another in Chaozhou. Mandarin is widely understood, however minimally, by most younger Chaozhou speakers, but the elderly usually do not speak Mandarin since teaching used to be done in the local vernacular.

Chaozhou accent in Mandarin

Native Chaozhou-speakers find the neutral tone in Mandarin the most difficult tone to master. Chaozhou has lost the alveolar nasal ending and so Chaozhou-speakers often replace it with the velar nasal when they speak Mandarin. The southern Min dialects all have no front rounded vowel and so a typical Chaozhou accent supplants the unrounded counterpart for. Chaozhou, like its ancient ancestor, lacks labio-dentals and so its speakers use or instead of when they speak Mandarin. Chaozhou has no retroflex consonants in its northern dialects and so,,, and replace,, and in the Chaozhou accent in Mandarin.

Hakka

Since Chao'an, Raoping, and Jieyang border the Hakka-speaking region in the north, some people there speak Hakka but they can usually speak Chaozhou as well. Chaozhou people have historically had a great deal of contact with the Hakka people, but Hakka has had little, if any, influence on Chaozhou. Similarly, in Dabu and Fengshun, where the Chaozhou- and the Hakka-speaking regions meet, Chaozhou is also spoken, but Hakka remains the primary form of Chinese spoken there.

Cantonese

Because of the strong influence of Hong Kong soap operas, Guangdong provincial television programs and Cantonese pop songs, many young Chaoshan peoples can understand quite a lot of Cantonese even if they cannot speak it with much fluency.

Hmong-Mien languages

In the mountainous area of Fenghuang, the She language, an endangered Hmong–Mien language, is spoken by the She people, who are an officially recognised non-Han ethnic minority. They predominantly speak Hakka and Teochew; only about 1,000 She still speak their eponymous language.

Phonetics and phonology

Consonants

Teochew, like other Southern Min varieties, is one of the few modern Sinitic languages which have voiced obstruents ; however, unlike Wu and Xiang Chinese, the Teochew voiced stops and fricatives did not evolve from Middle Chinese voiced obstruents, but from nasals. The voiced stops and and also are voicelessly prenasalised,,, respectively. They are in complementary distribution with the tenuis stops, occurring before nasal vowels and nasal codas, whereas the tenuis stops occur before oral vowels and stop codas. The voiced affricate, initial in such words as 字, 二, 然, 若 loses its affricate property with some younger speakers abroad, and is relaxed to .
Southern Min dialects and varieties are typified by a lack of labiodentals, as illustrated below:

Syllable

s in Teochew contain an onset consonant, a medial glide, a nucleus, usually in the form of a vowel, but can also be occupied by a syllabic consonant like , and a final consonant. All the elements of the syllable except for the nucleus are optional, which means a vowel or a syllabic consonant alone can stand as a fully-fledged syllable.

Onsets

All the consonants except for the glottal stop ʔ shown in the consonants chart above can act as the onset of a syllable; however, the onset position is not obligatorily occupied.

Finals

Teochew finals consist maximally of a medial, nucleus and coda. The medial can be i or u, the nucleus can be a monophthong or diphthong, and the coda can be a nasal or a stop. A syllable must consist minimally of a vowel nucleus or syllabic nasal.

Tones

Citation tones

Teochew, like other Chinese varieties, is a tonal language. It has six tones and extensive tone sandhi.
As with sandhi in other Min Nan dialects, the checked tones interchange. The yang tones all become low. Sandhi is not accounted for in the description below.

Grammar

The grammar of Teochew is similar to other Min languages, as well as some southern varieties of Chinese, especially with Hakka, Yue and Wu. The sequence 'subject–verb–object' is typical, like Standard Mandarin, although the 'subject–object–verb' form is also possible using particles.

Morphology

Pronouns

Personal pronouns
The personal pronouns in Teochew, like in other Chinese varieties, do not show case marking, therefore 我 means both I and me and 伊人 means they and them. The southern Min dialects, like some northern dialects, have a distinction between an inclusive and exclusive we, meaning that when the addressee is being included, the inclusive pronoun 俺 would be used, otherwise 阮. No other southern Chinese variety has this distinction.
Possessive pronouns
Teochew does not distinguish the possessive pronouns from the possessive adjectives. As a general rule, the possessive pronouns or adjectives are formed by adding the genitive or possessive marker 個 to their respective personal pronouns, as summarised below:
As wikt:個 is the generic measure word, it may be replaced by other more appropriate classifiers:
Demonstrative pronouns
Teochew has the typical two-way distinction between the demonstratives, namely the proximals and the distals, as summarised in the following chart:
Interrogative pronouns

Numerals

PronunciationFinancialNormalValueNotes
liŋ50〇 is an informal way to represent zero, but 零 is more commonly used, especially in schools.
also 空
tsek81also
also 弌
also as the last digit of a 2-or-more-digit number e.g. 二十一
or days of a month e.g. 一號
or as an ordinal number e.g. 第一
also 么 or 幺 when used in phone numbers etc.
no62also 弍
also
also as the last digit of a 2-or-more-digit number e.g. 三十二
or days of a month e.g. 二號
or as an ordinal number e.g. 第二 .
sã13also 弎
also 參 .
si34
ŋou65
lak86
tsʰik47
poiʔ48
kau29
tsap810Although some people use 什, It is not acceptable because it can be written over into 伍.

Note: : Traditional characters; : Simplified characters.
Ordinal numbers are formed by adding 第 in front of a cardinal number.
Voice
In Teochew passive construction, the agent phrase by somebody always has to be present, and is introduced by either 乞 or 分, even though it is in fact a zero or indefinite agent as in:
While in Mandarin one can have the agent introducer or alone without the agent itself, it is not grammatical to say
Instead, we have to say:
Even though this 人 is unknown.
The agent phrase 分人 always comes immediately after the subject, not at the end of the sentence or between the auxiliary and the past participle like in some European languages

Comparison

Comparative construction with two or more nouns
Teochew uses the construction "X ADJ 過 Y", which is believed to have evolved from the Old Chinese "X ADJ 于 Y" structure to express the idea of comparison:
Cantonese uses the same construction:
However, due to modern influences from Mandarin, the Mandarin structure "X 比 Y ADJ" has also gained popularity over the years. Therefore, the same sentence can be re-structured and becomes:
Comparative construction with only one noun
The 過- or 比-construction must involve two or more nouns to be compared; an ill-formed sentence will be yielded when only one is being mentioned:
Teochew is different from English, where the second noun being compared can be left out ''". In cases like this, the 夭-construction must be used instead:
The same holds true for Mandarin and Cantonese in that another structure needs to be used when only one of the nouns being compared is mentioned. Teochew and Mandarin both use a pre-modifier while Cantonese uses a post-modifier.
There are two words which are intrinsically comparative in meaning, i.e. 贏 "better" and 輸 "worse". They can be used alone or in conjunction with the 過-structure:
Note the use of the adverbial 好多 at the end of the sentence to express a higher degree.
Equal construction
In Teochew, the idea of equality is expressed with the word 平 or 平樣 :
Superlative construction
To express the superlative, Teochew uses the adverb 上 or 上頂 . 上頂 is usually used with a complimentary connotation.

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Teochew shares a lot of similarities with Cantonese because of their continuous contact with each other. Like Cantonese, Teochew has a great deal of monosyllabic words. However, ever since the standardisation of Modern Standard Chinese, Teochew has absorbed a lot of Putonghua vocabulary, which is predominantly polysyllabic. Also, Teochew varieties in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia have also borrowed extensively from Malay.

Archaic vocabulary

Teochew and other Southern Min varieties, such as Hokkien, preserve a good deal of Old Chinese vocabulary, such as eye, dry, and hide.

Romanisation

Teochew was romanised by the Provincial Education Department of Guangdong in 1960 to aid linguistic studies and the publication of dictionaries, although Pe̍h-ōe-jī can also be used because Christian missionaries invented it for the transcription of varieties of Southern Min.

Initials

Initial consonants of Teochew, are represented in the Guangdong Romanization system as: B, BH, C, D, G, GH, H, K, L, M, N, NG, P, R, S, T, and Z.
Examples:

Vowels

Vowels and vowel combinations in the Teochew dialect include: A, E, Ê, I, O, U, AI, AO, IA, IAO, IO, IU, OI, OU, UA, UAI, UE, and UI.
Examples:
Many words in Teochew are nasalized. This is represented by the letter "n" in the Guangdong Pengim system.
Example :
Ending consonants in Teochew include M and NG as well as the stops discussed below.
Examples:
Teochew retains many consonant stops lost in Mandarin. These stops include a labial stop: "b"; velar stop: "g"; and glottal stop: "h".
Examples: